Leviathan Read online

  His brother had escaped via a secret network some years before. Dinh spoke to the smugglers, who said they could repeat the getaway at the cost of all the family’s savings. A tall, well-built Kampuchean picked them up from their house at four in the morning. No baggage, no possessions. Normal street clothes for the long sea journey. They were crammed into a small sclerotic Honda, and driven to a province about 200 kilometres from Saigon. They pulled up to a stall at dawn, a hut beside the road with a very old table and some chairs. An old man ran the store, sixty years of age, thin and very poor. The driver asked them to wait while he picked up some other passengers for the next stage of the journey. He would return in an hour. They waited for three.

  ‘They abandoned us,’ he muttered fiercely, his voice quavering. ‘They tricked us. We were nearly captured. We sat there, my wife and my small children and, at the table next to us, two more people. Two other escapees, disguised like poor people, labourers or peasants. Only at the end, as we all became very frightened, did we know the truth. We sat in this hut watching the dirt road out the front, cars and trucks and carts rolling by, until we gave up and returned to Saigon.’

  After another unsuccessful attempt Dinh knew he had to organise his own escape network. He approached one of the few people he trusted outside his own family, another teacher at his school, his best friend Cuong. Cuong and Dinh worked hard at being good fanatical comrades during the day. So diligent were they about maintaining their facade that the school’s principal, an informer, trusted them implicitly, never imagining that the atlases, encyclopaedias and English language textbooks they gathered were to be used for anything more than school lessons. ‘They never thought we would escape,’ said Dinh with more than a touch of satisfaction. ‘During the day we worked very hard and contributed everything we could to the school. But outside, at night, we prepared our escape.’

  Cuong had many relatives in the fishing industry. They helped the teachers buy a twelve-metre fishing boat with a covered hold and a simple wheelhouse, helped them install the equipment and plan the provisions needed for a sea voyage. Cuong and Dinh pored over the old encyclopaedias after dusk fell, studying the oceans and currents and consulting Cuong’s closest relatives for more specific details about the coastal waters. They knew that when they left they would have to sail due east from Saigon, directly into the South China Sea on a heading for the military hot zone of the Spratley Islands. They would never make it there, they hoped. April’s prevailing winds and currents should, over the slow beat of many hundreds of nautical miles, drag the little boat and its seventy-three passengers around in a wide arc down towards the joining waters of Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.

  On the evening of the first day the boat hit a sandbank and stuck fast. A terrible shudder ran through the hull as they fetched up on the submerged hazard. Worried murmurs filled the darkened hold as the engines cycled up to no effect. The boat would not move. Finally word came down for all the men aboard to climb over the sides and push the stranded craft off. A bizarre scene ensued as two dozen Vietnamese men, all in their casual street clothes, surrounded by miles of ocean, laboured at the sides of the vessel, while far away on the horizon the lights of the coast shimmered and winked. It took half an hour to work the vessel free.

  There was no food on that first day because, apart from the incident on the sandbank, nobody was allowed above decks. They waited until they were several hundred kilometres beyond Vietnam’s territorial waters before relaxing the rule. And even then, with so many people squeezed into such a small area, it was not safe to have more than two or three people moving around at any one time. Everyone sat very still for a week and a half, fearful that movement might capsize the boat. Rice was cooked in little petrol burners up on deck and passed from hand to hand below. Foreign ships passing close by made no move to assist them.

  ‘We sailed for nine days,’ recalled Dinh. ‘Moving in the immense space of the ocean. We had to restrict the water and food, having nearly run out. Then a Singaporean warship came to us and everyone cheered and welcomed them. They pulled alongside, this ship was huge above ours. We begged them to help us into Singapore. The captain called a few of us into his ship, so myself and Cuong climbed up the ropes they dropped down. A very long climb as I remember. The captain was about twenty-eight. Very young and handsome. He wore an immaculate white navy uniform but, strangely, with the cheap sandals of a farm labourer.’

  Dinh and Cuong were escorted to the control room where the young captain softly interrogated them. He offered to provide dry food, water and petrol if they continued on past Singapore. The two starving, exhausted men begged him to help them into Singapore. He demurred quietly at first, but as they persisted his demeanour changed. He grew hard and angry, eventually barking at his men to throw the teachers over the side. They had to run from the bridge and scramble quickly from his ship to their own. The Singaporeans did give them some food and water, but as the stores were being transferred, the sailors attached a thick tow rope to the trawler. The warship cranked up its turbines, churning the water at its stern into a minor maelstrom as it put on speed and towed the refugees away. ‘We were like a leaf caught behind them,’ says Dinh. ‘Very fast in the water, skiing on their wake. Bouncing and smashing on their white wake.’

  They were finally cut loose and warned not to venture near Singapore. Six, maybe seven hours later they met with an Indonesian vessel. Civilian this time. The Indonesians made it clear their government’s welcome would be no more inviting. Later still the Malaysian navy appeared on the horizon. Ten warships in a line which the tiny fishing vessel could not hope to pass through. As night settled over the boat on the tenth day, the senior men gathered for a meeting in the wheelhouse. A small lamp threw a very weak glow over their sombre faces.

  ‘We knew we could not get in anywhere legally,’ said Dinh. ‘So we decided to enter anywhere we could. The first place we found. There was a weak source of light some distance ahead so we made for that. Then we saw a mountain growing up over the horizon. We had decided to force a landing and damage the boat so we could not be towed again.’

  As the distant whisper of surf grew to the roar of waves upon rocks, fear and excitement coursed through the refugees. Dinh’s heartbeat gathered speed and strength, slicing through the pressing cramp of exhaustion and hunger, his skin suddenly greasy with cold sweat. The boat began to turn and roll more violently than it had at any time since leaving Vietnam. The floor below them tilted one way and another, pitching everyone into each other in the dark, more dramatic than any carnival ride.

  They hit the Malaysian coast at two in the morning with a sick scream of wrenched and tortured wood. Sharp black rocks clenched the vessel all around, making it difficult and dangerous to jump off. Dinh gathered up his daughters in his arms. They clung fiercely to his neck as he leapt into the churning waters and sank immediately up to his chin. He struggled through the surf, waves rushing and dumping the three of them onto the sharp rocks. His daughters did not cry out, just clung more tightly. Around him others struggled through surf towards the beach. It took over an hour to get everyone safely ashore. Then the men waded back into the water with hammers and stones and broke up the boat so they could not be put to sea again.

  At first the adventure of Dinh and his family seems so unusual and exciting, so far removed from the prosaic daily narrative of an average Sydney resident as to be truly alien. And yet when you pause and let your gaze traverse the city, say from the window of an Airbus bringing hundreds of new visitors and settlers to the folds of the harbour, the Trans’ story resolves itself into a pattern of movement and experience so common that it stands as a leitmotif within the city’s deeper history. Below you, along hundreds of kilometres of beach and foreshore, in houses and streets stretching way back over the plains, climbing gradually into the dark blue haze of the mountains, there live hundreds of thousands of people with personal tales just as extraordinary as the Trans’. Casting wider, taking in familial history, yo
u net millions of stories, all similar in their elements of flight and redemption, for unlike the great cities of the old world, Sydney is almost wholly a migrant creation.

  Conceived of as a place where people would go and never come back, it has grown alongside eruptions of insensate violence, oppression and dislocation elsewhere in the world. Asian wars, European wars, Middle Eastern wars, depressions, recessions, pogroms and revolutions, all have delivered millions of travellers and refugees into the fetid holds of small boats and the uncertain mercies of the open sea. Across thousands of miles, down through hundreds of years they have arrived willingly or otherwise, fleeing or cast out of one home and forced to build another. Some have amassed fantastic wealth, some have died broken and alone. It is the nature of individual stories to vary so. However it is the common threads weaving through the city’s tapestry which stand out. The way the stories of Cockney pickpockets, Irish rebels, German Jews, Italian fishermen and Vietnamese schoolteachers all wind through and around each other in recurring patterns.

  When Dinh Tran was finally released from the migrant hostel he made six trips shuttling back and forth between Villawood and the small flat on the beach at Cronulla which would be his family’s first real home in Australia. This last part of his escape from Vietnam was attended by the same gnawing doubts about providing for his family which had assailed their earlier moves. They were launching themselves into a new world with little property or income and virtually no English. Without a car or suitcases, Dinh used a small beaten up plastic shopping trolley to move everything they owned. Clothing, books and shoes, it all went into old plastic shopping bags which he piled into the trolley before wheeling it a few kilometres away to Leightonfield train station. He’d catch a train to Central, wrestle the trolley off the carriage and onto an interchange for Cronulla. It was a long, tiring journey, repeated many times, but it marked the point in the Trans’ story where anomie gave way to action. ‘I had to concentrate on what to do’, said Dinh. ‘I stopped worrying. I started English classes. Then I found work.’

  It was a path walked by millions before them; Jews fleeing the Holocaust, Italians escaping postwar chaos and poor British migrants attempting to break with an oppressive class system. Like them, Dinh and his wife Phong took what work they could and bent themselves to the task of settling into a new country. Husband and wife found jobs at an aluminium plant in Caringbah. They worked a split shift for six months. Hard, continuous labour. Dinh, a small man, spent his day lugging big aluminium panels through the foundry and lifting them onto moving hooks. ‘We would finish heaving it onto the hook when another length would come through and we’d have to do it again’, he said. ‘All day. It never stopped, very heavy work.’

  Eventually he moved to a press section where he made sure the melted aluminium ran smooth and flat on the runners. Between each hot, rumbling slab he had a break of fifty seconds, during which time he’d study the English notes he had written at two or three the previous morning. The machine-like routine of his work life was matched by the larger cycles of his day. Night shift at the factory, home in the wee hours, correcting his wife’s English assignments and his children’s homework until just before dawn, then writing out his own lessons for the next day. ‘I’d take ten small note pages a day,’ he remembered. ‘Enough to put in my front pocket. I would have a new word, a definition and some phrases with the word every day. I did this for a long time, the whole time I was in the press section.’

  By July 1985 his English language proficiency was sufficient for him to pass the government’s public service exams, a test failed by many native-born English speakers. Living in Bankstown in the dark brick bungalow with cool, white tiled floors, he hoped his children would graduate from university and move into an occupation where they could be of service to his new city and country. ‘I educate them to become good citizens and support this society in the future,’ he says. ‘Not just to do everything they can to earn a high income. That is necessary for their family, but it is not the number one priority. Besides earning wealth, they must do something useful.’

  While the Trans are a small but emblematic success, the city is not always so kind to its newcomers. Many of Dinh’s countrymen have exchanged one form of oppression for another, escaping political tyranny for an economic one. If they are ambivalent or unhappy about their new home, the city too has reservations. For a place created by migrants it seems increasingly unwilling to contemplate a future in which they play a role. At times the look it turns on them is cold and guarded and deeply mistrustful and you have to wonder how such animosity came to be. But this is an old story, Sydney’s first, and it begins with the story of her mother city, London.

  Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Had Thomas Hobbes lived to witness the struggle for life by the underclass in Georgian England, he would have recognised his ‘war of all against all’ in a grim, skeletal form. The poor of that era were not the poor we know now. They were not just disadvantaged or underprivileged. They did not eke out dissolute, meaningless lives on welfare, fast food and daytime TV. They were the wretched of the earth, their existence every bit as woeful as the children who scramble over huge, smouldering hills of garbage in Jakarta today.

  For respectable society – the emerging commercial classes and the hereditary, land owning elite who lived as a corpulent tick on the body of the rural masses – the sufferings of the poor were, as the magistrate Sir John Fielding put it, less observed than their misdeeds. Their struggles for subsistence went unnoticed, except when they ground up hard against the property and sensibilities of the lucky few. ‘They starve and freeze and rot among themselves,’ wrote Fielding, ‘but they beg, steal and rob among their betters.’ Nearly 100 years later, with the industrial revolution under full power, Friedrich Engels thought the poor ‘a race wholly apart from the English bourgeoisie’. The latter had more in common with wealthy foreigners than the workers from whose labour they profited. Engel’s contemporary, Henry Mayhew, a pioneer journalist, sociologist and founder of Punch magazine, wrote a long and vivid account of the lower classes called London Labour and the London Poor. He admitted himself at a loss as to how to systematically approach his huge investigation, being wholly unacquainted with the objects of his inquiry; ‘… for each day’s investigation brings me incidentally into contact with a means of living utterly unknown among the well fed portion of society.’

  The forces of history which produced these inequalities were the same as those which threw British naval and military might across the vast penumbra of the oceans, which filled the Thames to choking point with thousands of creaking, bobbing traders’ vessels and awoke the countless millions whose ancestors had slumbered for centuries in the darkness of a peasant’s life. The convergence point of these snaking, humming lines of social and economic energy was London, the centre of an empire, the home of the Royal Court and Parliament, the seat of financial power, of the nation’s manufacturing industries, of its trade and communications. By 1750 one person in ten of all Great Britain’s population lived there. (In contrast, Paris could claim only one out of every forty Frenchmen.) It was more than ten times larger than Norwich, the second city of the realm. As the focal point of the British Empire, London became the centre of the known universe, its policies and adventures determining the fate of nations. For some, however, it was just the worst place in the world.

  For those who could not rely on the wealth of vast inherited estates, London life was a contingent, anxious proposition. The working folk of the city, and even the lower middle classes who depended on their custom, were roughly tossed about by chance. England was more often at war than peace between 1695 and 1815, and its economy constantly ground gears between the two. Even in settled times the average Londoner was subject to the cold winds of economic change which blew through the city every year.

  Virtually all work was seasonal. Shipping, the foundation of the whole economy, was less a bedrock than a chimera. Before steam power liberated seamen from the
fickle winds, thousands of families whose daily bread depended on finding work at the docks could be reduced to starvation by a mild change in the weather. In the months when the rich deserted the town, economic activity came to a standstill and whole classes of tradesmen were thrown onto their wits to survive. Of the thousands of house painters in 1740s London, one observer wrote that there was ‘not bread for one third of them’ and they were idle at least four or five months in the year. ‘Their work begins in April or May, and continues till … winter, when many of them are out of business.’ The two or three shillings a day a man could earn was ‘but a poor and precarious bread’ and the itinerant workers who followed this uncertain trade were ‘the dirtiest, laziest, and most debauched set of fellows in and about London’. The tailors of the same period were ‘as numerous as locusts, out of business three or four months of the year, and generally as poor as rats’. Under these circumstances even solid, bourgeois pursuits such as shopkeeping and school teaching were not to be relied on. Henry Mayhew described the moneyed attitude to such people, eerily anticipating the fashionable economics of the present day.

  Such a labourer commercially considered is, as it were, a human steam engine, supplied with so much fuel in the shape of food, merely to set him in motion. If he can be made to perform the same amount of work with half the consumption, why a saving one half the expense is supposed to be effected. Indeed the grand object in the labour market of the present day appears to be to economise human fuel.